


the crater

by fairybog



Series: the oyster dinner debacle [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Decisions, Demon True Forms, Existential Angst, Mind Palace, POV Second Person, Self-Hatred, Yelling at God (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:13:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23824375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairybog/pseuds/fairybog
Summary: in the aftermath of the oyster dinner, crowley spends some time in his head and comes to a decision.contains abstract body horror/dimensional shifting, light self injury, some worth issues and moral quandries.
Series: the oyster dinner debacle [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1721359
Comments: 7
Kudos: 18





	the crater

**Author's Note:**

> "I've fallen in love with you, / I'm taking it badly." - Noel Coward, from _Any Little Fish_
> 
> havent decided how many parts thisll be yet.

You step out of yourself, head a little to the left and into the desert. The pocket of spacetime seals behind you with a snap that drags your wings out. Not allowed to lie here, not in the desert. They bind to you almost instantly, feathers bent awkwardly beneath the pressure of some unknown judgement and you can't find your Voice in the silence. The sand that greets you is dark red, _an apple, something sanguine and sorrowful, a full bodied wine at a table in Rome_ , and you curl your toes in it, deep, to listen to the crack as your soles burn and glass your path beneath you. Roots you to your place, shoots up into your center, slips under your skin and plates scales down your spine, at your wrists, shuddering at your pulse points. Roots you only for a moment. Nothing grows here, in the deep red sand.

The night goes on forever, but the sky is powerfully clear and full of intimately familiar lights. 

The glass beneath you snaps and shatters and sticks into the roots you're trying to give purchase. Nothing happens when you go to sigh and your Voice isn't here with you. No air, no sound outside your points of contact. The blood seeping through the cuts between your toes sizzles as it hits the shards under them. You've walking to do, then. Best get to it.

You think you go East. Must do.

With your wings tucked and bound against your back they drag behind you as you shift clumsily through the sand, painting the way with your boiling, bloody footsteps and leaving a crystalline trail that looks for all the World the path of an enormous snake. The ripples of scales across your arms and through your center shudder out from under your ribs with every step. One auxilliary eye, hideous molten gold, unblinking, slithers around the swirling mass of your Self to watch your back, even though it's a pointless precaution. No one else is here, is ever here. You are always alone in the desert, for better or worse, as you cut your burning feet into the landscape to find your crater, the one lined with the sharp fragments of your halo and the blue embers of sulphur still burning like a coal fire just beneath the black crystal surface. 

You walk for a minute, a century, two hours, two weeks, who knows? No time at all, more likely, every inch of the waste around you still and utterly silent. Your Voice still will not come, not until you finally slither over the edge of your personal wreckage and slide through the stardust and sharp slivers of sand left in your landing and into the deepest point of impact. The ground here is smooth, glossy with your frantic pacing over the eons, and your feet finally begin to heal as your wings snap out around you, tips smouldering, the shockwave of goosebumps through your shoulders rushing more dark scales to the surface. You fold them around you, ignore the stench of the smoking feathers, and wait.

You think of Aziraphale. You think about his everycolor eyes and the way he smiles when he greets you and the victorious feeling that accompanies making him laugh. You think about a wing held over you on the wall of the Garden you spoiled- _I gave it away!_ \- shielding you when the rain came, and then you think about rain. A deluge, a boat, a rainbow. You think about the look in his eyes when he told you, the cloudy guarded gray they'd become, the grief that brimmed behind it. You think about the look in his eyes when he found you later, curled around a group of stowaways and the quiet smile he gave when you hissed threats at him and the briefest flicker of light returning to his face beneath wet whitegold curls before he left you there.

Something rings out at the base of what would be your spine, shifting through the thick layers of space, but it's too deep to touch yet, only grazing the furthest coil of the center of you. The Snake slinks around it and slides it forward, up the wrong way over black ice scales and through the fires they spark with their friction, but it hasn't reached you yet, not properly.

You think of Aziraphale. You think of the rhythm of his speech, of a silver bell, of the way he wrings his hands, again of the ever shifting blue of his eyes. You think of what he told you- _I know I talk too much_ \- the crumple of his face, the way he tried to smother himself out when he was happy. You think of who _everyone_ must entail, and you feel your fangs drip a single drop of furious venom.

You writhe with the Snake as it pushes the thing up, hiss at the pit it leaves as it crawls behind your sore, sorry heart. It rings out again, clearer this time, rattles your skull as it knocks up too many vertebrae and towards the back of your throat.

_Aziraphale, Aziraphale, Aziraphale._

Your Voice finally clicks into place and you give an empty, wordless cry into the silence around you. It travels only to the walls of your crater, does not echo, but it cracks through you like a thunderclap.

_How? How can this be happening?! I thought I didn't have this!_

You do not fool yourself into expecting an answer. You know better than that, but you still ask. You scream around the fork in your tongue, jostle the words around this mouth full of knives. Your Voice stays locked and strong at the base of your skull and comes easily, dripped in your venom as you spit curses into the ground at your feet.

You think of Aziraphale. You think of the Serpent, too.

_You have to be paying attention to a joke! You have to watch for a punchline! It isn't **fucking funny**! What am I supposed to do with this?! How many times do I have to fall before you think I've learned my lesson? What lesson even is there? Your tests don't make any blasted sense!_

The desert around you is silent for miles as you scream at your stars, watch them, lifetimes distant, burn themselves out without you, feel your words fall into the walls of the hole you dug yourself at light speed, nowhere near them or anyone else.

You think of Aziraphale, of his goodness, of his strength, of his delight. The glow of his skin. You think of pressing your mouth to his and the thought causes you to tremble to your knees. Your next thought is razor edged and brings a biting cold with it as it slices through the daydream, freezes you like a statue.

_Would he Fall? If he loved me? Would I be- I'd- I'd have to, wouldn't I? Have to pull him down with me. Stain him. Break him._

You look at the scorched sand under your blistered feet, at the wreck of you, at your Self. You look at your blackened feathers and the scales rolling in choppy waves down your arms, to the claws your fingers have grown into without your notice as you throw futile questions into a silent expanse of nothing but blood red sand. You think of the Fall. You think of Aziraphale Falling and learn you can still experience nausea here, feel it churn and roil in the coils of the Snake that was your Grace. You put your head between your knees, try to burrow away from the image, from the very real crash of despair it brings with it and receive nothing but traitorous tears for your effort.

Because you are alone, and only because you are so truly alone, you fall into them and wail bitterly, shake so hard you think you may come apart with the sobs and the hurt. You haven't wept like this for millenia, and you despise yourself. They burn.

You think of Aziraphale, and somewhere a heart breaks under the weight of your longing.

_Why do you let them treat him that way? How can they not see that he's wonderful, that he's the best of them? How could they leave him here with only me for company? How is that fair to him?_

_And how am I supposed to keep him safe when I'm the monster of his story? When I'm what's waiting in the dark, chasing him? How can I still **want** this way? How much emptier can my soul be?_

_Mother, I don't **understand**._

And then, quick as they came, the tears stop. Suddenly, you decide you don't need to understand. The questions of why and how crumble and blow away and leave a certainty in their wake, a defiant Knowing. You feel yourself rise and grin madly at the silent sky, throw your hands up, listen to the susurration of your scales.

You've had a Thought.

_What if I decide I don't give a shit? Huh? What if I say fuck it, I'm in love with Aziraphale? If I decide to stay that way? I don't **need** him to love me back!_

Your charred heart does a broken flip, back in the chest of your corporation, where you left it, and the impact ripples through you here, crests a dark ridge of scales defensively down your back, but you've made up your mind.

_You know what? I'm going to! I'm going to love him until the day the bloody world ends and nothing is going to stop me! I'll love him if he's the fucking death of me!_

He might be, at that. The possibility is quite real.The sand shifts into the crater and begins to pool around your ankles, sticking beneath your scales and cutting into the tender skin of your calves. You feel yourself shift with it, burning bright beneath your skin.

_I'm going to love him the way he deserves, the way Heaven could never dream of, and if his sword is the one that claims me during Armageddon I'll compliment his swing! Hell can't have him. I won't allow it. He won't Fall, not even I have to look Satan in the face for it._

With another manic chuckle you feel the slide back into yourself, concentrate on how your limbs creak against the strain of you, force your wings away and pick an errant shard of red glass from the calloused sole of your feet. You rise from the hole, glide easily over the path of jagged glass as you wander westward, a spring to your saunter as you smooth your edges and charm the Serpent back into its tightly wound place in the core of you with a slick grin and tear the last layer of time away to step through to your body. You leave the wasteland of yourself locked back away without so much as a glance.

\---

Crowley wakes smoothly enough, he supposes, for having been curled against a wooden door on the floor of a rented room after a night of horrifying revelations. There's a satisfied smirk tugging at his lips as soon as his eyes open. "And I won't be sorry about a second of it," he promises to the dawn breaking over Rome through his window, and it's true. "Not one bit."

**Author's Note:**

> this was written entirely to gravity's union by coheed & cambria, which is my favorite song probably in the world.


End file.
